Work and working – Page 7 – Music for Deckchairs

Waiting for disruption

Kate Bowles October 16, 2011 17 Comments

This week’s excitement has been the announcement by Pearson of their shakeup of the LMS experience. On the OpenClass website, where we’re told in very big letters that this is all Open, Free, Easy and Amazing, the promotional video starts with Adrian Sannier, Senior VP, making the big claim that the LMS “as you know it” is dead. Sannier brings serious university research and administrative experience to Pearson’s push into the edtech market, and I’m confident that he knows what…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

To market, to market

Kate Bowles October 5, 2011 4 Comments

And then there are situations from which even the most sympathetic creative cross-sectoral partnerships with ed tech, big and small, can’t save us. University marketing, for example. Visual branding is a struggle between the obvious and the obscure, and this gets very tricky when universities are trying to decide how to represent themselves. Images of location and local environment score well, as do shots of students talking to each other animatedly, preferably in carefully selected groups that hint at a…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education

Small is good

Kate Bowles October 4, 2011 4 Comments

I’ve been thinking back over the initial response I (and many other educators) had to Jarrod Drysdale’s heartfelt outburst about the story of his web app, Knack. He designed this to help teachers generate learner analytics that they might in turn use to agitate for change or demonstrate their accomplishments, and I’ve been engaged in a brief exchange of views on his blog on the way he reacted to its failure. First, I do think he’s right that in a culture that…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

In the education space?

Kate Bowles September 28, 2011 3 Comments

“The education space” is an imprecise sort of street address that’s beginning to bother me. It seems to mean something more than itself: not the precise space within which teaching or learning actually occurs, but the larger territory of business operations that brings together all those with an eye on the profits to be had from the future of education as a peculiar hybrid of market and service. And this week, there’s been some agitation in the education space. Firstly,…

Change management, Higher education

Actual results may vary

Kate Bowles August 7, 2011 1 Comment

Here’s another quick finding in the tealeaves of educational technology prediction. Providing you can get through the argot of the deals, mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, and patent showdowns, sometimes you find yourself face to face with the poetry of the safe harbor statement. It’s hard not to read it over and over to check that it still says what you think, and that it says it so beautifully. The safe harbor statement is a get-out clause currently derived from the Private…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Risk

Shy?

Kate Bowles August 1, 2011 1 Comment

Here’s one for the “learn something new every day” box. Last week Middle Seaman, via More or Less Bunk, alerted me to the idea that “the shy cannot learn.” It’s an intriguing diagnosis, not to mention very bad news for shy people everywhere, and I went off in search of its origins. Like any aphorism in translation, the exact deficit represented by shyness is really a matter of the intent of the original, and I’m not here to argue about…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, LMS evaluation, Student engagement

Going forward

Kate Bowles July 5, 2011 1 Comment

One of the challenges facing a higher education institution trying to choose a new learning management system is the blind taste test that passes for product demonstration. Typically this involves being hustled through a demo site that’s been populated with made-up students in imaginary classes exchanging imaginary one-liners with each other via a discussion board, while imaginary academics set up imaginary course content, and the whole thing flows through to imaginary gradebooks or generates imaginary tracking reports. Because the number…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk, Student engagement

What we’ve got here …

Kate Bowles June 22, 2011 0 Comments

As the Chilean ash cloud wafts through Australian airspace for a second time, we’re all thrown back into the science of prediction. What will it do next? Nightly news footage of passengers sitting in grumpy heaps in airports has drawn an unusual degree of national attention to Darwin. It turns out that we have one of the world’s nine Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers right here in Australia, and they’ve been putting on their good shirts for the TV cameras night…

Change management, Edtech and online learning, Higher education, Risk

WTF

Kate Bowles June 13, 2011 0 Comments

I’m still brooding on Ben Wildavsky’s review of his trip to Australia for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Whenever a visitor says “Aussie” like he does, there’s a risk of a Bill Bryson moment. But this time the issue isn’t our wacky fauna, our laid-back attitude, or the many ways that Australian nature can kill you—it’s our acronyms. In a post-AUQA world, how will TEQSA make sensible use of the AQF, the ERA, the CEQ, the AUSSE, and perhaps the…

Being an academic, Change management, Higher education

Blank slate thinking

Kate Bowles June 2, 2011 1 Comment

It seems we’ve made the decision to standardise our first year teaching mode to two hours of content delivery, with one hour weekly for class discussion. At the moment, more than half teach in this way, but some disciplines offer shorter lectures and longer discussion. It’s a classic bit of historical untidiness, like an uneven streetscape in an area destined for gentrification. Straightening this out will make our individual workloads easier to calibrate, and in turn this will make everything…

Casualisation of work, Change management, Higher education, Student engagement